derek abdinor

The SEC announced last week that it would make a decision in 2011 on whether adoption of IFRS is in the public interest and would benefit investors.

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, as part of his drive to make global sampling of financial statements easier, pointed out that there are many business languages in the world, and in most of these countries they report in IFRS.

There’s some analysis by Charles Hoffman highlighting different reporting standards for public and private companies, and the webcast of the SEC announcement. Calls for comment on the proposal are open. It would make XBRL taxonomy easier, n’cest pas?

I reckon that technology-ignorant clients are a double-edged sword. The Law states that whatever sophisticated concept you manage to run by them with no resistance, thou shalt be smitten with much rebuking about low-end things, eg:

• this content management tool doesn’t accept my MS Word tabs and indents! Shriek!
• I just want to print one piece of paper off this website page, not all 20! Rant!
• Search on my site doesn’t find the document I put up on the intranet last week! Rail!

An essential point about client education was made by Dominic Jones in a different forum: XBRL. I quote:

Most US investor relations officers (IROs) are not directly involved in disclosure technology and have a very poor understanding of it. This is mostly because about 75% of investor relations sections on US corporate websites are outsourced to hosting services. IROs have generally been entirely hands off when it comes to these sites so they’ve lost out on a lot of important learning over the years. They don’t understand what HTML is, so XBRL is even more alien to them.

As much as we think of expediency and taking problems out of the clients’ hands (or outsourcing those to us in these times), it makes us party to them not knowing more about the technology issues. The cycle continues.

Taking a leaf out of the “teach a man to fish” parable, I’m going to escalate the training of clients. Not just in terms of social knick-knacks, but along the lines of: What Every IRO Should Know.

This was always going to be a big thing: presence, alerts, IM, groups and whiteboarding.

It seems its coming to pass with the ESME project, through SAP labs.

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Jack Dorsey Presents Twitter from biz stone on Vimeo. Found via Jayz.

A year ago saw me trying to explain microblogging (when the Twitter Fail Whale was but a guppy), after having got the blogging presentation finally right. The Twenty20 Cricket World Cup was the rage, and I simply joined the dots: Twenty20 cricket is to 50-over cricket as Twitter is to blogging. It’s shorter, more intense and has engagement value. Not to mention the constant innovation required to get over the limitations — all the inventive shots come out of the bag.

To extrapolate, Test cricket is like web publishing. By this I mean a non-blog, static page where you are simply disclosing, informing, reporting and presenting. More traditional skills come into play here, namely proofreading, supporting diagrams and possibly running it by the organisation’s legal beagles or the human remorses officer.

After the IPL and the constant ineptitude of cricket’s governors, one may think that all must be abandoned and channelled into T20. Witness the recent Test, South Africa against England at Lord’s: five days’ batting and no result.

In this instance, I think Test cricket comes to the fore. Few other sports demand the mental endurance to bat for two days to save a Test. I used to be bored stiff by the format, but as I get older I appreciate the weighs and balances of battles within battles.

Think of the ICC as the board of a company, or the marketing department. Old-fashioned web publishing (we publish, you consume) may seem dead compared with the sexiness of microblogging, Qik, Seesmic. These guys were only recently introduced to blogging and now you’ve given them a 140-character text field, no supporting images and TinyURL. An example of a knee-jerk reaction was the creation of an annual report blog. You really oughtn’t to create dialogue around a historic document that, by definition, cannot change.

Just as Test cricket brings out various strengths and delights, static web pages do too. Microblogging is a different tool for, sometimes, a different audience. I think we’ve just scraped the surface of presence and microblogging being used in the workplace.

| this article originally published July 2008, Techleader

In a survey conducted by Agoracom, of 850+ Canadian retail investors, the following findings were made :

• 81% of Investors Prefer Small-Cap Resource Companies over Large-Cap.
• 48.4% of Investors were most Bullish on Gold compared to other minerals and metals.
• 73% of Investors Conduct the Majority of their Research (75%+) into New Stocks Online. This is a dramatic 18.65% increase over 67% of respondents in 2007 and serves as proof positive that an online investor relations program is critical if you want to reach new investors.
• 48% of Investors Conduct All of their Research (95%+) into New Stocks Online. No online IR program means you immediately miss out on 48% of all investors.

• 60% of Investors Use Discussion Forums For Information and/or Research.

• AGORACOM brand recognition amongst retail investors has risen by 360% over the same period last year. With 95% of our market budget allocated online, we are an actual case study about the power of online marketing to small-cap investors.

QUESTION #3 – What Percentage Of Your Research Into New Stocks Is Done Online?

100% of Research (21%)

90% of Research (27%)

75% of Research (25%)

50% of Research (18%)

< 50% of Research (16%)

NOTE: This is one of the most striking statistics in the entire survey. Specifically, 73% of small-cap investors use the web to conduct the majority (75% +) of their research into new stocks.

Even more striking is that fact that 48% of investors rely on the web entirely to find their next small-cap investment.

Finally, after averaging the numbers out, the web accounts for 77.05% of all research into new small-cap investments.

These figures are both striking and logical when you consider the fact that major finance media provides very little, if any, small-cap and micro-cap coverage.

Based on these figures, a CEO that fails to implement an online IR strategy is doing a great disservice to their company and shareholders.

****
excellent results from the survey by Agoracom. Retail investors were being arrogantly branded as nuisances less than a year ago, but with the increased shareholder activism and the market we’re in, they may be the best discerners of growth.

I recently had the need to get information on Vignette (story server) in a hurry, and followed a certain methodology which is no doubt common to many.

In order:

1. Google
2. Vignette’s site
3. Wikipedia
4. Phone dev friends
5. Twitter
6. Post a question on LinkedIn

You could seperate the first 3 into old-style information harvesting (even wikipedia), #4 into common sense, and #5 and #6 into “leveraging social media”. Well, the winner by a country mile for answers was LinkedIn! Let me share with you those that were public answers:

Vignette server: difficult to develop a website on top of it or not?

Answers

Krishna Kumar: Sr. Vice President & Group Editor – DARE at CyberMedia India Ltd
If you are talking fo getting it done by a consultant, that can be costly.

And the cost may have nothing to do with the complexity.

Vignette is supposed to be one of the most scalael and highend content servers out there, having hosted sites for Olympics, etc.

The server (plus various additional modules) itself is very costly. And consultants with experience on vignette do not come cheap

kkkg

Eric Small: Director, Consumer Product, with extensive technology background, focus on web communities and UGC
If you’re at the point you’re even asking this question, you’ve got a difficult task ahead of you. Vignette, or any enterprise-level CMS, is meant to solve the problem of large-scale content management. By and large, when you get to this point, your web site is going to be complex (and thus difficult). Otherwise you wouldn’t be considering spending that much $$$.

Use the CMS Watch report at www.cmswatch.com/cms/report/ to make sure you’re getting the right vendor. And get someone in your organization to read the CMS Bible by Boiko (ISBN 978-0764573712) to get a good sense of the process of building out a CMS-driven system. If you have the leverage (and you should with this kind of investment) insist on a prototype before signing on the dotted line.

By the way, if all of this seems out-of-scale for what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be looking at Vignette. For smaller implementations there are good open-source solutions like Drupal and OpenCMS.

Luis Mendez: Solutions Architect
Vignette can be very complex. But this will be the case with any combination of portal server, web server, application server, content management server, and dynamic business objects delivering along with search, security, and high performance environment.

It really depends on how you want to foray into the Vignette products themselves.

On one hand, you can use the Vignette out of the box content managers and have everything sent out via RSS, XML and so forth. That’s easy assuming all content management is done through the apps that come preconfigured out of the box.

On the other hand, doing things like delivering secured data with integrated directories and other ACLs on both the content management and the content delivery is another bowl of wax.

There are of course other issues to deal with such as client side request through frameworks like AJAX, how portlets communicate with one another in multiple states and how all of that translates into where you content is going to come from.

Getting a Vignette consultant on board would be an expensive proposition because they can help you traverse all of these topics. They are typically well versed in all areas of the web and then some!

===/===
What did we learn? That LinkedIn is powerful as it filters a lot of the noise and is targeted at professionals,  that you will get an answer from strangers and friends alike and that anyone wanting hard skills in this economy should hit the Vignette books. Thanks all!

This first appeared in Techleader, June 2008

I’m grateful for search engines, but I still find it hard to accept living with Dead Text. Letters and figures on a screen. Not able to be mined, found, unlocked, extrapolated into meaning. What irks me in particular is tables of figures, especially financial information, that you would have to re-key into excel or some ERM system to actually use. The web is two way traffic, and in age of openness about data (open source, openID, APIs etc) it rankles me that business information is locked in a bordered, left-aligned and decimalled cage.

All the financial information offered by companies to the markets tends to be of this nature. Analysts and journalists will get the printed annual report or results announcement and ofttimes have to re-key the figures in to develop scenarios and what-ifs. The announcements that listed companies file with the JSE Stock Exchange News Service (SENS) are submitted and viewed as ASCII text. Open Notebook (on a PC), throw an income statement in there and send to the guy who does your tax: it’s brain dead on usability and minimal on usefulness.

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is the format that will fix this. About 10 years in the making, it essentially enables all accounting jurisdictions (read: countries on a local level, and GAAP and IFRS on a macro level) to define their own taxonomy and map every single item in their ledger or statutory reports with a pre-agreed tag.

For developers: It’s XML, where the schema is the accounting taxonomy. Your XML doc is your financial statement, and the elements are pre-agreed tags with the values being, well, the figures.
For accountants: It’s choosing line-items from an agreed list and mapping them to your figures. And SAICA has endorsed it. Oh, and SARS too.
For other knowledge workers: Text in Notebook has no structure or meta data with it. But, in Excel, it at least has co-ordinates (eg: A3:C1) and may be part of a sum or total. If you do not prepare financial statements, it will probably be underlying your SAP, Oracle or even your general ledger.

Snapshot of Microsoft’s XBRL filing

Because every figure in your financial statements has an underlying tag, and is referenced in a structure, guess what? You have an API (application programming interface). This allows one to build middle-tier programs that can slice and dice these financials and make them jump through hoops. The business implication is impressive. It means that, through collating and comparing, XBRL-prepared financials, business and investment analysts can compare hundreds of companies where they previously only had time and resources to follow the top leaders in the sector.

China, having mandated XBRL years ago, is now in the pretty situation of having its companies analysed and earmarked for investment in New York and London, because XBRL allows you to compare statements done in different accounting jurisdictions.

Great strides have been taken in South Africa with XBRL South Africa. Recent changes in US listing policy means those South African companies listed in the States have to start filing as XBRL. Not a simple task, remember: you’re now filing XML as opposed to ASCII. It will roll out in South Africa in time, given the JSE’s enthusiasm.

This could open up new markets to companies who prepare their financials, as a matter of course, in XBRL. It could also bring the skills of PHP cowboys to bear on creating viewers and mash-ups and richer documents, and lend some impetus to the Enterprise 2 ideal.

Good link via great chum Elan Lohmann. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft). This is a semantic follow on from a convo we had once at the Gourmet Garage, where scales lifted from my eyes about Google and advertising. This is an established industry, if you read Dorothy L Sayers you’ll see that advertising in the 1930s and the client-agency-paper relationship is wholly recognisable today still.